CFP: The Temporal Turn in American Studies (C19, Berkeley, 4/12)

full name / name of organization:

Patricia Roylance

contact email:

pjroylan@syr.edu

C19 The Temporal Turn in American Studies - CFP

In recent years, scholars of the nineteenth-century U.S. have begun to question the dominance of standard conceptions of time in antebellum U.S. literature and culture, tracking instead what Thomas Allen has called “America’s manifold temporal cultures.” In addition to important studies by historians like Mark K. Smith (Mastered by the Clock, 1997) and Thomas O’Malley (Keeping Watch, 1996), literary scholars, including Allen (A Republic in Time, 2008), Dana Luciano (Arranging Grief, 2007), and Lloyd Pratt (Archives of American Time,2010), have treated the nineteenth century as a period of dynamic transition in American experiences of time. In this era, the growing power of market capitalism, with its mechanisms for regulating time and labor, catalyzed an already varied and sometimes conflictual temporal field. This “temporal turn” in American Studies has revealed a host of sites—religion, slave culture, grief and mourning, the science of geology, mechanical timekeeping, literary form, and elsewhere—where the “empty, homogeneous time” that has long been viewed as pivotal to the flourishing of a consolidated U.S. culture was challenged and contested.

We seek participants for a proposed panel on nineteenth-century American temporalities, to be held at the upcoming C19 conference, April 2012, in Berkley, CA. The panel will be structured as a roundtable discussion, with individual presentations of 7-10 minutes each. We welcome proposals on any aspect of nineteenth-century temporality, including but not limited to:

- The “deep time” of U.S. literary production (Dimock, 2006)
- The temporalities of reading: serialization, re-reading, etc.
- The temporalities of nineteenth-century media
- Material culture and time
- Literary genres and time
- Sexuality, gender, race or class and time
- Attitudes toward history or the future
- Models for analyzing multiple temporalities: beyond coexistence or conflict